The architecture of crisis

The cliché is that necessity is the mother of invention. But crisis pushes everything up another notch. Throughout history, pandemics, economic recessions and wars of global proportion have been catalysts for quantum leaps in medicine, technology and material science. Human disasters wreak havoc and we react as if in battle. Words change as we “fight” the crisis and “turn back the tide.” But from desperate responses to a devastating, often destructive cataclysm comes also a level of sinister benefit – and architecture is inevitably a recipient. The architecture of crisis almost always has a form of wicked novelty because the parameters of crisis are almost always new and unknown, requiring novel solutions to conditions never before experienced. Generally, the architecture of crisis arises in three ways: first, as a direct and immediate response to the crisis; second, as a project to relieve crisis; and third, as a form of future-proofing in case the crisis hits again. But there is also a fourth, often forgotten, aspect to crisis: its memorialization. So, historically, what has this architecture of crisis looked like? Have cities and urban spaces been reshaped by crisis and what evidence remains?

Response

Pandemics throughout history have resulted in mass deaths of unprecedented scale. A key spatial problem was how to deal with overwhelming numbers of dead bodies. In London, during the Black Death (1346–53) and the Great Plague (1665–66),